Innovative treatment

ABC weaves spinoff into Grey's Anatomy.

May 3, 2007|By Kate Aurthur Los Angeles Times

Television spinoffs are a tricky business. For every success like Frasier, which was birthed by Cheers, there's a Tortellis flop of the same lineage. The All in the Family DNA gave us the Jeffersons hit -- and the Gloria disaster.

In recent years, spinning off has been largely replaced by cloning -- as with the three CSI shows, which replicate the same format but with different casts in other cities. But tonight, Grey's Anatomy, ABC's celebrated and culturally resonant medical soap opera, is going old school: The pilot of its presumptive spinoff, starring Kate Walsh as the popular character Addison Montgomery, is embedded within a two-hour episode of the show.

Half of tonight's show will be a regular episode filled with love triangles, wedding dilemmas and medical crises; the other half will establish Addison's new world by jettisoning her from the show's Seattle hospital backdrop into a Los Angeles full of old friends and fraught relationships. Shonda Rhimes, the obsessively secretive creator of Grey's, has let few plot details leak, but the new show's cast members -- Taye Diggs, Amy Brenneman, Merrin Dungey and Tim Daly -- will make their first appearance tonight.

Rumored to be titled Private Practice, the show still must vie for a place on ABC's fall schedule, which the network will announce to advertisers and the press in mid-May. But considering that Grey's is ABC's top-rated scripted show, and more than that, has helped define its upscale, girl-power brand, it stands a good chance of becoming a series.

In three seasons, Grey's has already caused Americans to become addicted to the "Mc" prefix, a la Derek "McDreamy" Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey), and has imbued the word "seriously" with such meaning that it has ceased to be a mere adverb and is now more likely to be an entire sentence.

Addison was introduced to the show's heroine, Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo), and its audience in the last moments of the first season's finale. Addison, a neonatal surgeon sophisticate and a snoot, was the estranged wife of Meredith's boyfriend, the aforementioned McDreamy, and she was there to get him back.

Throughout Season 2, the romantic triangle became a quadrangle and later a pentagon, with the introduction of Mark, a k a. McSteamy (Eric Dane), and McVet (Chris O'Donnell), and then -- forget it. Suffice to say, Meredith and Derek got back together and Addison -- who, by last year at this time, had charmed fans with her vulnerability and sense of humor -- was left by herself.

Rather than feeling there was a dearth of material to occupy Addison in the third season, Rhimes thought the opposite -- she wanted her to have a show of her own.

"We weren't running around saying we wanted to do a random spinoff," Rhimes said. "It was about me getting excited about the possibilities for a character. There was a lot of really rich areas to explore with a woman who, especially in terms of Grey's Anatomy, had quote-unquote `everything.' Post-McDreamy, post-McSteamy."